ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to introduce the student to some of the concepts and goals of psychology, and to delineate some of the domain of aviation psychology. Like the rest of the aviation community, aviation psychologists share the ultimate goals of improving safety, efficiency, and comfort. Practitioners of aviation psychology bring to bear the tools and techniques of psychology to describe, predict, understand, and influence the aviation community to achieve those goals. Clearly, from some psychological research, very precise models may be constructed of human sensory responses to simple stimuli. The chapter also outlines some of the dominant models of human performance that are currently applied to further our understanding of how humans perform in an aviation setting. Of particular interest* to the field of aviation psychology are those models that deal with general human performance, skill acquisition and expertise development, human information processing, accident etiology and decision-making (specifically, ADM).
